AppFirst Broadens Monitoring Options

On the surface, AppFirst is doing what any software vendor does, enhancing its product and offering new pricing models to appeal to a broader audience. However, with its latest announcements, the developer of a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application problem resolution service is taking monitoring to a whole new level, says Bernd Harzog, performance and capacity management analyst for The Virtualization Practice.

"People are always offering different ways of packaging their software. The fact they're doing that is just normal," he says. "The thing that is really significant is the decision to offer this as an on-premises product as well as hosted."

Their history since starting in 2009 has been a SaaS-delivered model with the entire backend running in their data center. He says the company has clearly heard from customers that there is no way sensitive data about their applications is leaving their own data centers. "That suggests to me some very large and sophisticated customers are taking a look at this. I would say this is extremely significant as far as their advancement as a vendor and customer adoption. This is a very significant release. It shows a lot of progress on their part, and the kind of progress you see when customers are buying this offering and paying good money for it."

The company is focusing on the midmarket, which typically finds out about application issues from end users (68% of the time, according to an Aberdeen survey on APM). Another survey (Enterprise Management Associates) shows that, on average, organizations have 60 hours downtime per year, which works out to approximately $2.8M per year spent identifying and solving problems.

AppFirst's new features include server tags and log file data access. With server tags, customers can now take a more granular look at their operations, creating specific groups with different alert thresholds to simplify server performance management and troubleshoot issues related to server utilization, performance, and configuration, said the company.

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